Rather than slow down, the evolution of technology seems to be speeding up. Case in point: In just a couple short years, natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence have become commonplace. Without giving it a second thought, we call on Siri or Cortana to give us driving directions to the nearest four-star Italian restaurant.

It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to picture NLP or even facial recognition taking on a larger role in our daily lives, but I envision a button-free future. What could that look like?

Imagine walking into a conference room and the video conferencing system turning on automatically. You prompt the system to dial into your 3 p.m. meeting—no manual authentication necessary, facial recognition took care of it—and the camera focuses on you while the microphone adjusts to the volume of your voice. As each participant walks into the room the camera reframes them into the shot. When it’s time to start the meeting, you request that it be recorded and that a transcript be sent to each of the participants.

All of this happens naturally—no buttons to push, no numbers to dial. Meetings are streamlined so that participants can walk into a room and start collaborating. The technology makes it all happen, but it also does it while virtually disappearing and letting the most important aspects of the meeting – the face-to-face communication – take center stage.

It’s exciting to think about how close we are to this imaginary, “just like in person” scenario becoming a reality.